Academic Positions
Duke University, 2019-
Assistant Professor of History
Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History, 2020-2021
Boston College, 2018-2019
Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Science & Technology Studies
Harvard University Center for the Environment, 2016-2018
Ziff Environmental Fellow
Selected Honors and Fellowships
Seed Grant for “Remapping Environmental Toxicity, Promoting Planetary Health," (Boston College Institute for Liberal Arts), 2019
Subject Development Grant for “The Chemical History of Environmental Health” (Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry), 2018
Norberg Travel Grant (Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota), 2017 (write-up of research based on this grant in CBI newsletter)
Nathan Reingold Prize (Annual graduate student student essay prize of the History of Science Society), 2015
Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship (Princeton University's top honor for graduate students), 2014-2015
Partington Prize (Triennial essay prize of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry), 2014
Visiting Predoctoral Fellowship (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), February-April 2016
Herdegen Fellowship in the History of Scientific Information (Chemical Heritage Foundation), 2013-2014
Workshops organized
“Chemical Humanities and History of Chemistry,” History of Science Society Forum on the History of Chemical Sciences, November 2021. Co-organized with fellow members of the Forum on History of Chemical Sciences.
“Remapping Chemicals, Environments, and Toxicity,” Boston College, June 2019.
“Grappling with the Futures: Insights from Philosophy, History, and Science, Technology and Society,” Harvard University & Boston University, April 2018. (Member of symposium committee.)
“Internationality: Modes of International Cooperation in Science,” co-organized with Geert Somsen, 25th International Congress of History of Science and Technology, Rio de Janeiro, July 2017.
“The Science of Information, 1870-1945: The Universalization of Knowledge in a Utopian Age,” co-organized with Lynn Ransom and Robert Fox, University of Pennsylvania, February 2017.
“Aesthetics and the Life Sciences,” public symposium co-organized with Helen M. Berman, Stephen K. Burley, Kathryn Maxson Jones, and Christine Zardecki, Rutgers University, October 2016.
“Unnatural Kinds: Contemporary Perspectives on Scientific Classification,” interdisciplinary workshop co-organized with Julia Bursten, San Francisco State University, May 2016.
Recent Lectures and Presentations
"A sustainable genealogy of pine and pesticides" 4S Annual Meeting, October 2021. [slides]
“Substitution: A halogenated history of ‘essential’ chemistries,” UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, May 2020. [slides]
“Synthetic history: A chemical experiment in environmental humanities,” University of Illinois, Experimental Environments symposium, March 2020. [biblio]
“Molecular bureaucracy: A chemical history of data,” invited lecture for “Data Then and Now,” University of Washington lecture series in STS and data science, February 2020. [slides] [video]
“‘Chemical Space’: Remapping chemicals, IP, and information,” Invited Presentation, European Research Council workshop on “Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020,” Norrköping, Sweden, September 2019.
“Molecular Bureaucracy,” Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, September 2019, in session “Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments,” organized by Jody Roberts and Emmanuel Henry.
“From compound words to digital codes, how IUPAC’s past and present enable chemistry’s future,” Invited Lecture, 47th World Chemistry Congress, Centenary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, Paris, July 2019, in symposium “IUPAC and Chemistry: A Century of History.” [slides]
“The machine and the molecule: Chemistry in the history of AI,” Towards a History of Artificial Intelligence, Columbia University, May 2019. [slides]
“Compound Words, Synthetic World: How the history of chemical information matters for grappling with the materials of the future,” NIH Nanotechnology Working Group, April 2019.
“Roundtable: Quantification, Models, and Metrics in Environmental Knowledge and Policy,” American Society for Environmental History, April 2019.
“History Beyond the Classroom: Research, Teaching, and Service in the Himalayas,” Boston College History Department, March 2019.
“Molecular Bureaucracy,” PFAS Project Lab, Northeastern University Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute Lab, March 2019.
“Stewarding chemical research through standards development: A chemistry librarian’s feast,” American Chemical Society National Meeting, Boston, August 2018 (with Leah McEwen).
“Substitution,” presentation in the workshop “Technologies in Use,” organized by Lissa Roberts and Lee Vinsel, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, April 2018.
“Chemistries of Regret,” presentation in the symposium “Toxic Tales and Climatic Conundrums,” organized by Ruth Goldstein, Harvard University, March 2018.
Education
Princeton University, 2010-2016
Ph.D. in History (Program in History of Science), July 2016
Dissertation: “Nominally Rational: Systematic Nomenclature and the Structure of Organic Chemistry, 1889-1940”
M.A. in History (Program in History of Science), 2012
Major field: Modern Science (Michael Gordin)
Minor fields: Modern Europe (Philip Nord), Medicine (Keith Wailoo)
Harvard College, 2002-2006
A.B., magna cum laude, in Literature. Thesis: “Virginia Woolf’s Symposia: Ideas of the Party in Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and The Waves”